restricted (18+)

Your Energy is Purple. You are a visionary with unmatched intuition and spiritual consciousness. The mystical world and unexplainable forces fascinate you. There resides in you a true dignity and nobility, and others see you as a worthy leader and loyal friend. You are often very mature, with a deep understanding of human nature, and you will instinctively encourage and guide others toward their full potential.

You find it natural to express yourself aesthetically and artistically, you may be involved in the artistic professions, a religious organization, or in activities that have a degree of ceremony and ritual. You would make a good therapist, healer, psychic, or entrepreneur.

my Gran died last night. I don't have a lot more to say about it at the moment so for now I'll just post this link to our blog about her, if anyone cares to read: Gran's passing.

as hard as it was to watch what the ravages of the stroke & age did to her, it's been even lovlier having the last few years to be so close with & care for Gran. I know she appreciated it, and to my Mother & Aunt (since I didn't say it last night): you did her proud, were a great comfort to Gran and were so loved. excuse me, a correction: you are so loved... her love hasn't gone away, it's just taken another form.

thank you for making the decision that allowed us to stay so close to Gran these last few years, and for being such shining examples of how love can manifest itself in concrete ways.

we're going to miss Gran's physical presence a lot, but we're also very glad that her recent suffering is over.

go kick up your heels again now that you're free of this earthly burden, Gran - you've earned it.

hmm, seems like this place is beginning to be the place I come & report all my ouchies, rather than a regular record of life goings-on. well, at least they're things that have gone on, so they qualify.

about 3 weeks ago we had a huge dump of snow here; weighed so much it broke a huge branch off a tree in our yard, which then fell off. that was inconvenient, but okay. the problem was, another branch had broken but hadn't fallen from the tree; it was hung up, leaning on the power lines coming to the house from the pole on the street. it was obviously dragging them down & we started to notice a few weird flickers of power & such, so I phoned the landlord to ask him to get someone to come deal with it, check our power & get the tree branch down. that was a Friday.

apparently he didn't get the message, because I heard nothing back. the power flickers & such got worse over the weekend, so I tried again on Monday. got the office who said the landlord was still away on vacation so they gave me his cell number. called that, described the problem to him, so he arranged for a hydro guy to check it out. the hydro guy called Monday afternoon; I described what the problem was & told him I thought some of the wires had separated from the house. he said that wasn't possible because the wires are all wrapped. anyway, the earliest he could get here was Tuesday morning. okay...

meantime, of course, the wind kicked up quite a bit on Monday night & the branch started bouncing on the power lines. suddenly we had a huge power surge, and all our electronics started humming loudly & pulsing. I ran around unplugging stuff, and phoned BC Hydro. they recommended turning the main breaker off, then back on after 5 minutes, and call them back if that didn't return things to normal. of course it didn't, so I called back & they said they'd have a crew out soon as possible. around 2:30 am the crew called & said they'd be here when they were finished at their current job.

waited all night for them, but they never showed up. round about 9 am Tuesday morning, the guy I'd spoken with on Monday showed up. 'oh!' he says, 'the ground line is pulled right out of the house!' duuuh. 'that's what i was describing to you yesterday,' said I. so he says he'll have a crew come out right away & cut the branches down, fix the power. sure enough, they showed up within about 20 minutes & fixed us up.

taking stock afterwards, only our microwave and 3 alarm clocks died. oh, and possibly our washing machine... the first time we used it after the power problem, it filled up & then just sat there humming. joy. so now I have to try to get the landlord to submit a claim on his insurance, so I can replace my burned out appliances. I have no idea if he'll agree, but I sort of figure since I started trying to deal with this as soon as it was an issue, it's not my fault & I shouldn't have to deal with trying to find the money to replace everything that got zapped. must say though, I'm grateful the rest of our electronics - computers, tv, dvd player, etc - survived it okay!

so that got dealt with, and a few days later my tooth started bothering me. this was a tooth that I knew needed to be extracted, but wasn't able to deal with it sooner. anyway, long & short of it is that the tooth got infected & absessed, so I dealt with a weekend of incredible pain & swelling before I could see the dentist. he gave me a prescription for heavy-duty antibiotics, which I had to take for at least 7 days before they could remove the tooth safely.

yadda yadda, thankfully - after a week of pain-hell - the swelling was down & the area felt better. I got the tooth extracted on the 30th, and that brought the pain back for a day & a half or so. thankfully now it's not hurting anymore, but it's still healing of course. part of the healing is waiting for stitches to dissolve; apparently I don't bleed much, and the dentist couldn't poke me enough to get me bleeding in the empty tooth socket, so he had to insert a gel plug and sew the socket up to avoid any possibility of 'dry socket' (which is when the bare bone under the tooth is exposed... usually a patient bleeds, the blood clots, and the bone is protected. no clot, bare bone = major pain, apparently). anyway, thankfully that's over.

I feel like I've just gone through the month from hell, and rather feel like it'd be nice to go hide out somewhere. not feeling real motivated to get back to business properly, or to anything else. somebody take care of my life for me while I go on vacation, please. oh, never mind... money is too tight for vacation. I'd get as far as into my car, and just have to sit there & read or something. oh well.

hope everybody is having a nice holiday season :). so far so good, chez loz; we have company for a couple of weeks here, & it's been nice. we had a really nice Christmas day/dinner at my parents' home. we're kicking around the idea of staying in for New Year's Eve & just inviting a few friends over to ring in the New Year with us.

this afternoon I spent a few hours with my Gran. I left later than expected & by then my back door (which I'd been trying to open so I could put my laptop bag on the back seat) was frozen shut, as it had been snowing again. I decided against forcing it, put the laptop in the front seat & then brushed & scraped the car windows off before taking off.

I was on my way to pick up Bren & friends from his friend's place outside of town & suddenly my interior lights came on.... back door was obviously thawed & registering as 'open', so I figured I'd best stop & close it. pulled over, opened the door & stepped out onto the side of the road - which was so icy, I immediately fell down, landed on my left knee. I had just grabbed the bottom of the door frame & was attempting to stand up when *wham* I got whacked in the back & went down onto both knees again. not only that, but my left arm got wrenched near out of its socket - or at least, that's what it felt like - and I started sliding along. turns out the car was rolling, and it was the open door that had knocked me over again.

I realised I wasn't going to be able to get my feet under me just yet so I hung onto the door frame for dear life & just let the car drag me along until I was able to get a footing... that was about 5 feet. by the time i managed to get my feet under me & scramble back into the driver's seat, the rear end of the car was about two feet into the road; thankfully no cars coming either way.

I guess the gear shift hadn't *quite* made it into 'Park' as I'd thought it had, because once I was back in & stopping the car I could see 'Reverse' was clearly engaged. tricky thing that, but not something I'll forget to check again!

once I was back in the driver's seat & had the car pulled over safely to the side again, I took stock: my knees were screeching in pain, neck & shoulder wrenched & aching, and I thought my jeans must've been ripped through to the skin. not so, but there are now two little white patches on my knees where the colour was rubbed out by sliding 5 feet over the icy pavement. my left knee - which is the worst one, as far as the arthritis goes - took the worst of the abuse & is now purple-bruised & a bit swollen. I'm aching all up through my left arm & down into mid-back, but at least nothing worse happened... could've been run over too, if I hadn't instinctively clamped onto the door frame & hung on for the ride!

so, I'm okay but feeling rather sore in body & mind. also feeling very grateful nobody came along to witness that little occasion of self-humiliation! how embarrassing. and painful. not a situation I'd like to repeat anytime.

aside from all that, things are going okay here. I've been getting more work & life is ticking along. I'm hoping to have a good New Year's Eve as the lead-in to a great 2008.

here's hoping all of you have a great one too! happy holidays to all :). one day soon I will catch up properly here.